Gone
by Ygrayne
Summary: Gawain's thoughts and actions as he watches Tristan die. One-shot.


_**My first King Arthur fanfic (my first fanfic ever, for that matter), so if you want to review it, do be kind! I hope Gawain's portrayal isn't OOC – the movie doesn't really go that much into his personality.**_

_**Anyway, in the film **_**King Arthur**_**, no one really seems to care much about Tristan's death; Lancelot gets all the attention. Tristan is just a corpse on Bors' shoulders as they gather around Lancelot's body. To make up for that, thousands of fanfic writers have paid tribute to the dead scout.**_

_**I join the ranks of these writers.**_

_**Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me. Really. Some characters are just too real to be owned.**_

And so, abruptly, the battle is over.

Over. The fight, the desperate struggle to survive is over. Strewn on the ground all around him are the bodies of the dead and dying. The sword swings in Gawain's hand, stained with the blood of his enemies. He sheathes it. He needs it no longer.

Gawain raises his face, blood-streaked, to the sky. After the battle comes the task, more painful than the fighting itself, of identifying the dead. But first he must have time to absorb the full knowledge of it all, to taste the sweetness of victory. A smile splits his dirty face, the teeth startlingly white against the grime-stained skin.

_I survived._

Never has the world looked so beautiful to him. Gawain examines his hands and feet, feeling his body strong and unscathed still. He is alive. And others, surely, are alive alongside him.

He turns his head. There they come, from all four corners of the battlefield. Bors. Galahad. Arthur. The Woad princess, Guinevere. They are filthy and bloody like himself, but alive! He feels his smile widening and widening. He wants to run to them, to embrace them and shake their hands, to dance and leap about for the sheer joy of knowing that they are all right.

And then, suddenly, Arthur is crying out. There is grief and despair in his voice and Gawain realises, with a shock, that Arthur and Guinevere are kneeling over the body of Lancelot.

'It was _my _life to be taken,' Arthur wails. 'Not this, never this!'

Gawain walks over, his feet leaden, and looks down. Lancelot is sprawled dead on the ground, an arrow thrust cruelly through his chest. He cannot bear to look at him for long. He turns away, unable to digest the knowledge that Lancelot is really dead, that his companion and comrade for half a lifetime is gone forever.

And it hits him like a punch in the gut. One more is missing from among them.

He draws in his breath sharply and looks around, scanning the corpse-strewn field. Tristan. Tristan is not there. He _must_ be there, he _must_ have survived the battle. Tristan always wins. Any moment now and Gawain will spot him, doing what Tristan has always done after every battle fought in their fifteen years together. He will be there somewhere, moving with his familiar silent grace among the bodies, curved sword in hand – watching, with the bright not-quite-sane light in his eyes that Gawain knows and fears. Watching the wounded die, very, very slowly.

Gawain closes his eyes. _Any moment now._

He opens them again.

Tristan is not there.

_No. NO._ Gawain is aware, as if looking down on himself from a very great distance, of his breath coming quick and fast and the sudden fear in his eyes. Bors, too, looks around uneasily, and with Galahad at his heels begins to search among the bodies, all his usual boisterous triumph gone in this new fear. Let Tristan come leaping out of the darkness, with the mad glint in his eyes and the swift deadly movements which always strike fear into their hearts, and Gawain knows that he will weep with relief and embrace his comrade, no matter how frightened he may be.

'Tristan?' he calls. He can hear the quaver in his voice. 'Tristan!' He starts to run, his heart thumping in his chest, and at his side Bors and Galahad are running and calling out too, and Gawain can only think, _He must be here, he must be alive._

It is a heart-wrenching task, seeing Woads and Saxons alike cruelly slain on the battlefield, their bodies twisted and cold; and still more painful that he must kick their corpses aside in his search. He cannot bear to think that Tristan may be among them. Tristan has always been strange, sometimes terrifying, but they have fought together since they were boys and he is a part of Gawain's life, incorporated slowly but surely all through these fifteen years. Gawain can hardly remember a time when Tristan was not there, silent, disconcertingly so; yet his presence oddly reassuring.

He slows down, stops, something hard and cold coiling in his chest.

No. Surely, surely it is not him. But he knows the armour and he knows the sword clutched in the limp hand, and he knows, even as he bends over the dying man, whose face he will see.

'Tristan!' He shakes him, and the eyes are dull and glazing and there is a great, horrible wound in the neck so that the head is almost severed from its body, and from the wound the blood pours forth...

'You found him?' asks Galahad behind him, a useless question, and then this young foolish boy says the words they are all thinking, the words that twist cruelly like a knife in the wound: 'What? That's impossible. Tristan always wins his fights.'

Gawain ignores him, ignores the foul curses of Bors at his side. He shakes Tristan harder, seeing, as in a dream, the familiar tattoos dark against the bleed-whitened cheekbones. The eyes flicker towards him, for just an instant. But they are glazing over with alarming speed, turning into metallic, lightless orbs when once they had been living and shining in a living face.

'TRISTAN!'

He is still alive, he can be saved, he can, and Gawain is ripping the sleeve from his tunic and pressing it to the wound and not admitting, even to himself, that he cannot staunch the blood and that it is futile. And somewhere in Gawain is a small cold voice, one that he is ashamed of, saying: _What a disgusting mess. He shouldn't even be alive after all this time..._

Galahad is kneeling beside him, now, and Gawain can sense the shock that the younger knight is feeling. Galahad has always feared Tristan, perhaps hated him a little. But all the same it is impossible that Tristan can die, impossible that he can be lying here at their feet with the blood streaming down over his armour. Behind him Gawain hears Arthur mourning over Lancelot's corpse and the rage is building inside him, burning, a fire that may break out any moment. How dare he kneel still at the body of Lancelot, where just a few feet away another knight lies dying? And, with a sense of shame, Gawain must force himself to keep talking, keep looking at Tristan, to not think about Lancelot, and at all costs he must not let himself know that his grief for Tristan is not truly real...

'Tristan! _Look _at me!' And the voice says, mockingly, _He takes a very long time to die doesn't he...?_

...and the eyes are still glazing over and the blood flow slows down, not because of the pressing on the wound but because, soon, there will be no more blood left...

'Damn it! STAY WITH ME!' he shouts, furiously, futilely. Shouting desperate words, yelled by generations of men at the sides of their dying comrades all through the ages. 'We fought together for fifteen years...Don't you dare die on me, Tristan! Don't you DARE – !'

But even then, guilt-ridden, he knows that it is useless; that it is all a farce. Galahad and Bors have already stopped pretending; reluctantly, but inevitably, they walk over to Arthur's side. Gawain watches them go, with anger not so much at them as at himself. He knows, with a sick feeling in his heart, that he is only mourning Tristan because no one else will, and that after Tristan is gone, even Gawain himself will not miss him that much. And the shame of that knowledge hurts more than his grief.

He glances up, tears mingling with the dirt and streaming filthily down his face. The sky is dim and overcast, shrouding the bodies in ever-increasing darkness. High above them, a hawk circles among the clouds, very far away.

He looks down again, almost afraid of what he will see. The eyes are empty now, opaque – cold dead pools in a dead face.

Gone.


End file.
